


Polaris

by skarlatha



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Relationship, Season 2/3 Gap, Stargazing, Tumblr Prompt, Unresolved Romantic Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-11
Updated: 2015-09-11
Packaged: 2018-04-20 03:35:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4771931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarlatha/pseuds/skarlatha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rick loved Lori once, loved her sophistication and how she civilized him, made him everything a good man should be. But Daryl... Daryl is something dangerous, something wild. Something that feels more like truth than the facade Rick has lived under for most of his life. </p><p>Or, the one where Rick has watch during a cold autumn night and Daryl keeps him company.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Polaris

**Author's Note:**

> This was written to fill an anonymous prompt I received on Tumblr for "something autumn-y, a bit sad, where Rick can’t get rid of being cold, but in the end something or somebody makes him warm." I'm not sure if it's what the anon was looking for exactly, but I was happy with how it turned out! For ambiance, you should listen to Sleeping At Last's song "Sun" while reading this, because that's basically the soundtrack to this fic. 
> 
> Thanks to [Michelle_A_Emerlind](http://archiveofourown.org/users/michelle_a_emerlind) and [TWDObsessive](http://archiveofourown.org/users/twdobsessive) for beta-ing! Also, you can probably tell that I've been (virtually) hanging out with [s0urw0lf](http://archiveofourown.org/users/s0urw0lf) a lot, because I channeled her a bit in this one, except that her writing is better and you should defs go read it post haste.

When Rick was twelve, his parents took him to Mount Rushmore. He doesn’t remember much of it, honestly. He remembers the crowds and the heat, the way it rained that afternoon and turned the white stone storm-gray, the pretty green rock he pocketed and carried around the rest of the trip. The monument itself he barely recalls. He knows he must have seen it, must have spent time gazing at it and pondering things like freedom and history and immortality even if he didn’t have the words for it at the time, but he doesn’t remember.

What he does remember from that trip are the Badlands.

Painted rock carved by wind and water and time, something natural and wild and untamed, something that doesn’t give the slightest fuck about humanity and politics, something larger than a twelve-year-old boy with unruly hair and a rock in his pocket. Something that would only become wilder and more beautiful with even more wind and water and time, unlike a manmade carving that would fade away into smooth granite as the years marched on.

And he remembers that night, standing there dangerously close to the cliff edge, holding his arms out like wings at his sides while the wind whipped up and out of the canyons and he felt like he could fly straight up into the sky, glittering with millions upon millions of stars, so many more than at home where the lights of Atlanta polluted the darkness even from a hundred miles away. He’d tried to count them, tried to carve the image of the Milky Way into his mind so that he’d never forget what it had felt like to stare into infinity without civilization getting in the way.

He’d forgotten. But now he remembers.

//

It’s cold for Georgia in September, almost unnaturally so. There’s frost on the ground, shining in the moonlight like there are stars both above and below where Rick sits on the roof of the house they’ve taken over for the night. He draws his knees up to his chest and crosses his elbows on top of them, tilting his head back and looking at the sky like he had when he was a boy and the end of the world seemed like a bad science fiction novel and not an inevitability.

His watch ended over an hour ago, but he’d waved T-Dog back inside, claiming that he wasn’t tired and wasn’t cold. Both things were lies, of course, but even though the inside of the house was reasonably warm with all the body heat and the remnants of a small fire in the fireplace, somehow it seemed icier there, under the disappointed eyes of Lori. Of the whole group, really. So it’s better up here, with the cold-burning stars as company, Rick’s breath heavy and white in the autumn air. Less lonely, somehow.

Another hour passes. Maggie comes up and tries to get him to switch out watch with her. Rick flexes his stiff fingers and shakes his head, and eventually she goes back inside too. And then Daryl climbs the ladder to the roof and sits down beside Rick, mirroring his position with his knees up, then shakes his hair off his forehead and looks up at the sky.

The silence falls between them, heavy and comfortable like a patchwork quilt. Rick says nothing, and Daryl doesn’t ask him to. The night is quiet around them, and Rick remembers taking Lori on dates, trying to be romantic by spreading out a blanket in the field and staring up at the stars, telling her that she’s more beautiful than anything in the night sky. He’d meant it, at the time. By then he’d forgotten the wild beauty of the Badlands, replacing it with a more civilized definition of the word--makeup and paint and polished marble, satin and chrome, everything wiped down with antiseptic and placed behind a velvet rope: _look but don’t touch_. And that had been fine, for a while, to have someone so classically lovely, to stand beside a work of art that the average person would recognize as such.

Daryl, though, isn’t beautiful, not in any traditional sense. His eyes are narrow, hard, distrustful, his hands rough and calloused, his body littered with fault lines like the striations of sandstone and his muscles shaped by the elements, by a life lived outdoors in the Georgia mountains instead of hidden away behind cement and steel. He’s the sort of man who would be easy to overlook back in the before-world, a quiet watcher with careful eyes, and yet Rick is captivated by him now, desperately and pathetically thankful for the man’s mere presence on the roof with him: grounding him, centering him, _protecting_ him.

After a while, Daryl starts murmuring softly, pointing at stars and giving them names, tracing the shapes with his fingers and showing Rick the sky. Boötes and Casseiopeia. Cygnus. Arcturus. Lyra, Pegasus, Ursa Minor. Rick asks him where to find the North Star and Daryl shows him, tells him how to use it to find his way home again. It’s cold on the roof but Daryl radiates heat like he’s a star himself and he smells of woodsmoke and ash, pine needles and the scent of autumn, and it settles Rick in a way that Lori’s perfume never had. He wants to lean in, press his nose into the curve of Daryl’s neck and just _breathe_ , just let the other man take the pressure off of him for once, hold him close and give him time to rest.

It’s not even romantic, necessarily, this desire to press himself against Daryl and soak in the archer’s warmth. It’s not the need for love or sex or skin-to-skin contact. It’s a need for shelter from the storm, the desire to make Daryl into a contour in the rock that he can huddle behind when the winds get cold and rough, a cave where he can settle down and sleep, just for a few hours until sunrise comes and the war begins again. The need to have someone who will catch him if he steps too close to the edge, if he forgets that the arms he stretches out at his sides aren’t actually wings.

And yet he can’t help but think about how it could be more, how it could be everything. How it seems like he and Daryl could take on the world if they stood against it together, how _strong_ he feels when Daryl stands behind him. How Daryl’s mouth would taste like rainwater and the stars, how the tips of Daryl’s fingers alone could set him on fire and burn away all the civilization from him until he’s left bare, wild, _pure_.

He shivers, the cold finally seeping down into his bones, and he feels Daryl’s arm settle around his shoulders, pulling him closer, enveloping him in warmth and safety. He leans against the archer’s side, lets himself put his head on Daryl’s broad shoulder, and after a moment he whispers _I need you_ and Daryl murmurs _I’m here_.

//

All those years ago, Rick’s father had called him back to the car, turned on the radio and steered them back toward Georgia, toward a warm house with artificial light pouring from the windows, toward a comfortable life that never felt as _right_ as it should have, and gradually the Badlands had released their grip on Rick’s mind, fading away to a vague sense of dissatisfaction that worried the back of his mind like a loose tooth but never came forward and showed itself. And in time, he’d forgotten what it felt like to watch the stars wheel overhead, to listen to the call of a coyote echoing over the buttes and spires until it’s impossible to tell where it comes from, to spread his arms and believe for just the barest second that anything is possible, to feel like part of nature instead of an intruder in it.

He’d forgotten. But now, leaning against Daryl here at the end of the world, he remembers.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://skarlatha.tumblr.com)!


End file.
